It was rare pre-LLMs, post-LLM seems more and more go this way actually. Just few hours I wrote this in a comment about established brands embracing the new user-firmware world:
My personal guess (and hope I suppose) is that all of them go in this direction cough Elektron cough, which judging by the current wave, doesn't seem impossible.
I don't think this is entirely accurate at this point. It has pretty wide adoption in the educational space, and a number of well-known studios have adopted Blender into their workflows.
The Blender development fund wouldn't be topped-up to the tune of $3 million/year if it were purely funded by hobbyists.
But when I say "niche hobby software," I'm talking about the relative scale of the user base.
Every working adult who touches a computer in 2026 is using office software. Photo editing is so common that "Photoshop" has become a verb. These two use cases are behemoths compared to 3D modelers.
> Why do EU let its auto industry struggle against Chinese EVs? What about electronic products? Why can Europe wean off foreign energy such as from US or Middle East or Russia?
Your two goals are fundamentally at odds with each other: cheap Chinese solar panels and EVs are the only realistic route to energy independence.
That many of the EU car manufacturers bet hard against the EV transition, is pretty much a bed of their own making.
If you are that reliant on LLMs for your workflow, then how do you not have any redundancy in place? Assuming you've have any kind of basic abstraction in place, swapping in API keys for a different provider should be a simple config change...
> If you are that reliant on LLMs for your workflow, then how do you not have any redundancy in place?
You could ask that question about the MS outage as well and million other things.
I suppose I can't understand because where I work our scale is small enough that we can have an actually resilient infrastructure and can stay in control of almost everything we need, and when you get bigger it's more difficult? I mean, even an outage from our email provider could be worked around in a matter of a couple hours at most.
I'm really not sure it's not just because most managers are clueless and shortsighted though.
> we can have an actually resilient infrastructure and can stay in control of almost everything we need, and when you get bigger it's more difficult?
It's a culture thing, if it leans "engineering-heavy", you usually have contingencies, tests restoring backups and lots of other "goodies" that gets skipped if you don't lean that way. Microsoft and similar organizations been a sales-and-enterprise leaning organization for most of its life, so of course they're not gonna think about what happens when their "always online cloud tooling" goes offline when setting things up, it's much more important to finish things quickly and have a long list of features to be able to present to customers.
There are already entire companies out there without a single human who has any idea how their systems are implemented, let alone being able to manually fix them. This problem will only worsen with time.
Depending on company size and security posture (like mine), we only have one provider claude and the company outright bans all other ones, even local models unless approved via a lengthy process
> Depending on company size and security posture (like mine), we only have one provider claude and the company outright bans all other ones
I get it, we had to sign separate HIPAA BAAs with Anthropic and OpenAI - but we did sign them both, if only to be able to have access to a wider array of models.
The point is not to prevent it, the point is to minimise the resulting liability. Whether by re-org'ing so that the people who are sleeping together are not in a direct reporting relationship, or by letting one party go, and so on...
Also worth noting that in the event his wife doesn't stand by him, this immediately becomes the second largest divorce settlement in history (behind only Bill and Melinda Gates). That's not the kind of headlines the PR department is love with either.
I have a feeling this one falls in the same category as "sweet summer child", which, while technically as old as the hills, only hit critical mass after game of thrones popularised it
Nonetheless, at the same time they made Humble Games redundant, they put the Humble Bundle on life support, and my understanding is that its now operated by contractors rather than an in-house development team.
Several publicly traded companies have (or had) majority-owner CEOs, which makes it more than a little awkward for the board to fire them. I can't really see the board outing Zuckerberg under similar circumstances
reply